She's Way Beyond Desperate Now

Felicity Huffman Tries To Keep The Oscar Talk Over Transamerica In Perspective.

January 22, 2006|By Mary McNamara Los Angeles Times

For almost 30 years, Felicity Huffman has been a "working actor." This is a term used most often to describe someone who is not a movie star, who still requires a list of titles to explain who she is -- "You know, the woman who was on Sports Night, the one who's married to the guy from Fargo." Now, Huffman is a star. Last year, she went from being the "Desperate Housewife" on the back fold of the Vanity Fair cover to the one with the Emmy in her hand.

This year, she's collecting a few more statues to dust, starting with a Golden Globe award last week. Huffman had nominations in two media, one of them predictable -- she, along with several other members of the Desperate Housewives cast, was up for best actress in a television comedy -- the other less so. In Transamerica, she plays Bree, a transgender woman coming to terms with her son. It's not only her first nod for best performance by an actress in a motion picture drama, it's her first lead role in a film. And it was that role that won her a Golden Globe on Monday.

The sound you hear in the background is the rising drone of Oscar bookmaking. With so many of the best-picture possibilities dominated by men -- Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Constant Gardener -- the best-actress category is wide open, and Huffman's chances are getting better all the time.

"Last year," she says, "I couldn't get a dress for the Emmys. I finally had to ask for one I had used on a photo shoot. This year I'm getting calls from people who want to send me sketches already."

Still, Huffman remains a working actor; frankly, she's never worked harder in her life. On the day of the Golden Globes nomination, she was on the phone with her sister while making oatmeal for her two young children when her publicist called. A few hours later, she flew to Phoenix to attend a screening of Transamerica, only to fly back later that night.

"I am thrilled," she said of the nomination. "It really is the lifeblood of these independents -- how else will anyone know to see it if there weren't film festivals and awards shows to spotlight them?"

selling the picture

In the weeks around the initial limited release of Transamerica, she was everywhere -- at the New York opening, at the Los Angeles opening, in every magazine from Entertainment Weekly to Time. The film is about a male to female transgender woman who discovers she had fathered a son. To get her psychologist to sign off on her final surgery, Bree must meet the young man, who has a complicated life of his own. As they travel from New York to Los Angeles, much is hidden and revealed.

Huffman's performance got raves. With a physical presence that is difficult to reconcile with her small frame, Huffman nails the self-conscious and self-obsessed Bree, from the hopeful lilt of her still tenor voice to the studied hair-swinging swivel of her head.

The movie doesn't exactly have "blockbuster" or even "indie smash" written all over it, so Huffman had to sell it. In every possible venue, she has explained how she prepared for the role (by meeting with transgender women as well as a life coach who helps them through transition), how it differed from life on Desperate Housewives (night and day: for one thing, on a low-budget film, craft services "is a saltine and some mayonnaise") and what her actor husband, William H. Macy, thought of it all (he advised her not to get so caught up in playing a man becoming a woman that she forgot to actually act).

"I have been very busy," she said recently. "No one has ever been this interested in me before and probably never will be again."

With the film headed into wide release (it opened Friday in South Florida, after an award-winning showcase at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival), Huffman is pretending that things will calm down. "I told my friend that and she just laughed and said, `It's just getting started.'"

Playing `a freak'

The timing of this year's Golden Globes, coming five days before ballots for Oscar nominations close, could make her chances for an Oscar nomination seem more likely. With no multiple-nomination front-runner in this year's race, many smaller independent movies are shouldering their way into awards season with big publicity pushes. Huffman and Macy have a lot of goodwill in Hollywood -- they are one of those rare industry couples who actually seem sane -- and the role of Bree is the sort of utter transformation that often transfixes the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said, predictably. "Really. But I will say that if you had told me a year ago that this movie we were making for $2 was going to win awards, I would have told you you were crazy. I would have said, `No, this is going to be one of those movies where my husband watches, slaps his hand to his forehead and just shakes his head.'"